Last night’s episode of The Comedians has a surprise twist to it: it’s actually pretty good. If you’ve given up on the show already (and it seems like everybody has), the siren call of a half hour of chuckles might not be enough to lure you back to the TV’s warm glow, but “The Red Carpet” shows signs of progress. The gaps littering “Pilot” and “Come to the House” are mostly closed. Up until the show’s latest outing, something in the Billy Crystal/Josh Gad team-up has been missing. What that “something” is has remained more or less elusive, though in part you can attribute The Comedians’ mediocrity to its paucity of jokes. A program so monikered ought to be funny, after all.
“The Red Carpet” solves the case of the absent punchlines by having Billy and Josh get fershnickered on pot while en route to the Kids’ Critics Awards. It also addresses the elephant in the writers’ room, which is that The Comedians lacks drama. Putting the veteran entertainer together with the young up and comer in the hopes of organically generating conflict is a fine if lazy tactic for fomenting discord. That’s the exact strategy The Comedians has deployed thus far, and it hasn’t been working. A show where Billy and Josh act like spoiled, entitled prima donnas isn’t interesting. A show where they vibe, occasionally raise eyebrows at one another, and cause trouble for the show-within-a-show they’re making, though, is, and the introduction of stakes feels like a great mercy.
It’s possible that the trouble brewing in “The Red Carpet” will be forgotten by next week. Maybe Denis O’Hare, who makes every scene better with little more than muted exasperation, will have a total brainfart and he’ll forget that his two big stars have made themselves look like assholes in the press. But whether he does or doesn’t, The Comedians will continue to improve so long as it maintains its newfound irreverence. Any show that kicks off an installment by taking the piss out of Anthony Bourdain and concludes with, among other things, a Blackfish joke deserves some love, right? As our boys wander around a grocery store, roasted out of their gourds, the level of laughs ratchets from “chortle” to “braying”.
The contretemps of the set-up—Billy and Josh have both been nominated for the same award—lays out certain expectations for how the plot will unfold, but “The Red Carpet” doesn’t go the obvious route by turning into a figurative slap fight between its leads. Going by “Pilot” and “Come to the House,” we anticipate that one of them wins the prize while the other reacts with childish acrimony. But “The Red Carpet” never wanders that path, and instead lets the guys have a much deserved wacky adventure that ends with a surprisingly human moment of bonding. It’s nothing flashy; if you blink, you might even miss it, because the script graciously declines to belabor the point. Outside of the vacuum of the series, Gad might not do what he does sans the influence of talents like Crystal. The Comedians has already made that inference, but as Josh and Billy gorge on ice cream in an empty aisle, they acknowledge it with economy before moving on to the episode’s finale.
If there’s any area where “The Red Carpet” falters, it’s in the B-plots. The Comedians now appears to have a plan for its principals, but the secondaries are still underserved. At least Megan Ferguson knows her way around her character; Esme now gets what it means to be a PA, but very little happens to her outside of creepy interactions with Matt Oberg and dry misunderstandings with Stephanie Weir. It’ll probably take a little more time before The Comedians figures out what to do with the supporting cast, but for the time being, we can breathe in relief that the protagonists—and the story at large—finally have direction.
Boston-based critic Andy Crump has been writing about film for the web since 2009, and has been scribbling for Paste Magazine since 2013. He also contributes to Screen Rant, Movie Mezzanine, and Badass Digest. You can follow him on Twitter. Currently he has given up on shaving.